Five Tips to Help Your Business Grow Successfully

How you grow your company can be as important as whether you grow your company. To avoid potential pitfalls, consider these tips to successful growth:

1. Find your key focus. It is important to select and stick to a key focus, particularly in times of an uncertain or slow economy.  High-end houses or mid-range?  Solely construction for a particular industry? For example: city projects like schools or EMS stations.  Go to what you’re good at, so you can deliver consistently and successfully.  During a recession, it’s harder to add a new line of business to your already existing capabilities.

2. Don't become overconfident. Like a favored team that lets down its guard and loses to an underdog, an attitude of overconfidence can bring about business loss.

 A company’s high growth rate during an “up” economy can give the false impression that there’s no place to go but up!  Be careful in judging past successes with an objective eye, so that you don’t mislead yourself into thinking that you’ll get those jobs you bid for at the same rate as during a boom.  With a tighter economy, you might discover that your “regular customer’s” preferential builder is now more readily available and your bids are less likely to be chosen.  Overconfidence is unrealistic and can spell disaster.

3. Don't define your business by your product. Virtually any product can become obsolete over time. Therefore, MacDougall recommends that you not define your business by your product, but rather from your customer's perspective of the needs that you satisfy.

For example, you're not in the new home business – you're in the high-end custom ranch business.

4. Make your marketing message consistent. If you want to grow your company, marketing is essential, and how you market is important.  Know the local trade journals to advertise in, and  become involved in local chapters of state-wide organizations relating to construction or building.  Work on building your contacts for later, now!  

Be sure you have a consistent marketing message, and that EVERYONE in your company knows what it is – and can repeat it!  The more your name is known in the business, the more likely you’ll be thought of first when someone has a need.

5. Practice what you promise. When money and time is tight, mistakes are much more noticeable.  If your marketing campaign promises a certain turnaround time, then you need to live up to that promise. Otherwise, you risk diminished customer satisfaction or possibly losing customers.

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Although business growth carries with it a certain amount of risk, attention to these areas can help to make your company's growth successful